A Burmese tycoon with links to the military regime is helping humanitarian aid from British taxpayers and private donors to reach the victims of Cyclone Nargis.

In an effort to overcome the restrictions imposed on foreign aid workers by the junta, the British Department for International Development (DfID) and the charity Save the Children are working with Serge Pun, a millionaire banker, golf-course owner and construction boss, to run supplies down to the remotest and hardest-hit areas of the Irrawaddy delta.

Mr Pun’s association with both the British Government and one of its biggest and best-loved charities illustrates the compromises and paradoxes being forced upon aid donors by the crisis. By Burmese standards he is a reputable businessman, but aid workers acknowledge privately that he is not the kind of figure with whom they would associate in normal circumstances.

Mr Pun maintains good relations with the Burmese dictatorship, has socialised with its leaders and is a donor to state-run charities.

In bringing relief to devastated areas of the Irrawaddy delta, he is working closely with less savoury businessmen, including Kyaw Win, a regime crony who is banned from entering and doing business in Europe because of his intimate links with the Burmese generals.

Without Mr Pun’s help, however, the whole process of bringing aid into Burma would be much more difficult, from clearing the bureaucracy at the airport to identifying needy people and transporting supplies downriver.

“This is a fascinating situation and it’s taken us into areas we’re not used to dealing with, but I don’t feel compromised by co-ordinating with Mr Pun,” said Andrew Kirkwood, country director for Save the Children in Rangoon. “He genuinely wants to help and he is looking for ways to do that. The Government feels more comfortable working with organisations they know, and these [businessmen] are the people they know the best.”

Mark Farmaner, of the UK Burma Campaign, criticised the collaboration. “We’re very uncomfortable,” he said. “He’s clearly a regime crony and we believe that the regime want to use the cyclone to break down restrictions on dealing with them and their cronies. This is a slippery slope to humanitarian aid being compromised.”

The Burmese Government escorted Ban Ki Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, to carefully selected areas of the Irrawaddy delta yesterday, and today he will meet the country’s leader, Than Shwe, in an effort to persuade the junta to open the disaster area up to foreign aid workers. Until now, aid groups have had the choice of either giving their aid directly to the Government or attempting to distribute it themselves with inadequate numbers of local Burmese staff.

The Burmese Government’s efforts in the area have been patchy at best, with none of the large-scale military deployments that the Chinese Government, for example, has carried out to deal with the Sichuan earthquake. Countless private individuals, Buddhist monasteries and social activists have travelled to the delta to give aid, but have often encountered obstruction from the Government.

Yesterday, Burmese exile radio reported that six activists and eleven members of the opposition National League for Democracy were arrested in Rangoon after returning from relief work in the delta.

The junta has subcontracted much of the responsibility for providing aid to favoured businessmen. They include notorious tycoons, such as Tay Za, a close friend of Than Shwe, and reputedly the lover of one of his daughters, and Steven Law, owner of the country’s biggest conglomerate and son of a warlord and drug dealer.

By comparison with them, Mr Pun is, in the words of the Burmese opposition magazine The Irrawaddy, “among Burma’s most professional and least corrupt business leaders”. He owns companies operating in financial services, property, car manufacturing, and construction.

Since Cyclone Nargis struck, he has dispatched doctors to the delta, and plans to set 1,000 of his staff working in full-time relief for a year or more. “We’ve basically gutted our company to focus totally on this disaster,” says Mark Tippetts, a spokesman for Mr Pun, an ethnic Chinese who also goes by the Burmese name Theim Wai.

According to Mr Kirkwood, Save the Children declined the offer from Mr Pun of a donation of $100,000 (£50,000), but accepted practical help.

An online newsletter put out by Mr Pun in the name of the Cape Negrais Committee carries photographs of his employees unloading British aid alongside staff of both Save the Children and the DfID. It lists the plastic sheets, cooking utensils, and hygiene kits blankets that Save the Children has entrusted to it, as well as 14 metal river boats given to the British charity by the DfID. Both the DfID and Save the Children say that this is misleading, and that all the aid entrusted to Mr Pun’s employees has also been accompanied by Save the Children staff.

A DfID spokesman said: “In testing circumstances such as Burma, we have to be prepared to do what works to get aid to the people. DfID has no direct relationship with Serge Pun.”

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